Student Response about Thesis Essay Writing
A Story from a Student
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Lisa Gallegos
Eng 1108-64
Journal #5 A3
How I Learned to Write a Thesis
by Lisa Gallegos
If you were to look at my writing today, you might
think I have some skill at it. But if you were to look back at me a few years
ago, you would notice I didn’t even have the slightest clue as to what a thesis
was. I feel that I am as good as I am at writing solely because I have put in a
lot of practice and time into it.
Due to the fact that I was always enrolled in the
honor English classes at my school, I have been exposed to writing essays for a
longer amount of time than most of the students in my grade. Although writing
essays was something I had to do early on, I did not fully understand what an
essay was until I reached my freshman year in high school.
Mrs. Murr was my English teacher that year. Let me
tell you, her class was no joke. I was used to not having to do anything until
the last minute and still manage good grades. Once I entered her class; however,
I realized that wasn’t going to cut it. It was essays all the time in her class
and in the beginning I was averaging C papers. From then on I quickly learned
that I needed to do something to fix that. I developed a method that worked best
for me when it came to writing essays. I first began with learning what an essay
was inside and out. I made sure that I understood all the parts to an essay and
their importance within it. After I did that, I could apply what I have learned
to writing future essays.
As far as I was concerned, an essay was made up of
several parts. An essay contains an intro, body sections, and a conclusion. The
intro needs to include one’s thesis and tell what the reader is to expect from
the paper, the body needs to support the thesis and follow the pattern the intro
laid out for the paper, and the conclusion needs to close the essay. I then used
this layout, and still use it today, for every essay.
This layout also helped me to create and use a rough
outline. I tend to do a lot of the thinking for a paper in my head, and
sometimes it gets confused up there. So in an attempt to fix that, I learned
that using an outline can help keep things sorted. An outline also helps during
the actual writing of the paper because it serves as a map of what you have to
do next.
Learning how to write an essay was not easy; essays
are complex and require a lot of thought. Once I understood exactly what an
essay was, I was able to write better essays. This method has worked for me to
this day; and even when I was required to write essays in Spanish for my Spanish
class, I used the same basic method and still got through it!
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